Mauri and I have stayed put this summer rather than finding adventure away from home. That’s mostly because we’ve had projects involving our house or we were w.a.i.t.i.n.g for them to get started. Once all our stuff was put back in place (or given away) after the paint and flooring project, we were eager to get on with our backyard redo. We had a wonderful plan in place, but it involved others doing the actual work. A fence builder was lined up and the yard guy thought they could get started the first of July. A three-week delay while the fence builder took a vacation? OK. Then a two-week delay while he finished another project? OK.

You see that dog run? Years ago Mauri and his backdoor neighbor had near-matching dogs, yellow Labs. So the neighbors decided to build a dog run that extended across the property lines.

(approx. 1989) Aren’t they cute? Mauri managed to get this picture during the one minute they actually used their dog house. Turned out Champ and Liz weren’t such close friends after all.

Meanwhile I came to live at 514, and now 22 years later and a with different backdoor neighbor we decided to reclaim that space for our backyard.

Terry and Mauri took out the chainlink fence.

Yay! for progress!

Here’s how it looks now while we wait for a callback from the stump grinder.

Backing up the timeline . . .

. . . to the day we had Pete’s tree* taken down. these pics show the removal of Pete’s tree in an effort to give our soon-to-be new grass a better look at the sun. (*Pete planted this Douglas fir on Arbor Day in the first grade!)

You can see how tall his tree grew.

Down it comes, one branch at a time.

So what’s holding up the progress now? The stump grinder needs to do some more work on that tenacious root system.